Was the Muhammad Cartoonist burned alive?

On 23 June 2006 we received an email containing this message:

> The artist who drew the pictures of the Prophet Muhammed
> (P.B.U.H) has died in a fire. He was burned alive. Denmark
> government is hiding the news from the public and everyone has got
> to know. Plz spread this.... (Its the price one must pay 4 the
> insult of Allah's Prophet) plz copy and paste this as many ppl...
salaam all brothers and sisters, i plead and request you to send
this to all people, this includes the ones amongst the 'kaafir'. if
this message reaches the kaafir then no kaafir in this day and age
will have the courage and guts to go against islam. lets establish
islam as a mazboot religion and lets hope this message reaches the
kaafir so it shakes their souls. insha-allah sign your names if you
have recieved the mail,let us sign our names and see how many
signitures we get, add another number and sign your name becasue
the prophet on judjement day will say, what did you do in my defence
when the kaafir made mockery out of me? this is the least we can do
my brothers and sisters.
1. Sunni Foundation

and then the list continued with 26 individual names.

A quick search on Google revealed that this story has already circulated widely,
but none of those websites that deal with hoaxes and urban legend has exposed it
so far.

Look for the telltale phrase, 'Forward this to everyone you know!'
The more urgent the plea, the more suspect the message.

Virtually any email chain letter you receive (i.e., any message forwarded
multiple times before it got to you) is more likely to be false than true. You
should automatically be skeptical of chain letters.

This rule is just proven true again.

Many Muslims would certainly rejoice about such news, and so the author
of the hoax probably thought that with this message he could bring happiness
to many brothers/sisters in these dark times. However, he merely ends up
exposing the enormous gullibility of the many Muslims who have taken the
message to be true and have spread it around the community and posted it
on plenty of blogs.

Despite the world wide coverage of the story of the Muhammad cartoons, and
detailed discussion in many different media, neither the author of this
message nor the gullible people who believed and spread it further have
understood that the press in Denmark and Europe and America is free,
i.e. neither printed nor electronic media are under government control.
Because the government was not responsible for the original publication,
the government of Denmark could not apologize for what a free press has published,
nor could it suppress news like the above fictional story. Since the Islamic world
does not know a truly free press, this particular blunder will occur again and
again and again. A detailed discussion about the Muhammad cartoons and its
consequences can be found in this
article.

In any case, the point that is exposing the story as a hoax without any question
is the fact that these twelve cartoons were the result of a cartoon contest
and have been drawn not by one person but by many different cartoonists.
Despite the fact that the Jamaat-e-Islami that put out a bounty for the murder
of the cartoonist made the same
mistake, the call for murder was real. However, this misunderstanding exposes
the above story as a hoax driven by a combination of wishful thinking and total ignorance.

Jochen Katz

P.S.: We are glad to see that there are still some Muslims out there
who have brains enough to NOT uncritically accept and forward such messages,
see this blog.